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Glofo thinks 7nm vital for industry

by on07 November 2016


IBM purchase cleared the way


GlobalFoundry’s CTO has said that the industry needs 7nm and its recent IBM purchase is helping him build up a new cunning plan for the technology.

Talking to Digitimes, Gary Patton has the job of building up the foundry house's 7nm manufacturing technology. He said that the acquisition of IBM's microelectronics unit was a big help because it had been doing a lot of work in differentiated 45/30/22/14 nm process nodes and improving its algorithm technologies for use in servers. That integration between the two sides will give GlobalFoundries a clearer blueprint for technology development.

Patton said that the 5G industry, as well as mobile computing, IoT and automotive electronics will be the growth drivers for the next decade, particularly 5G products and datacentres which need support of high-performance computing.

He added that GloFo’s FinFET process was divided into two generations, including 14 nm and 7 nm.

“We cooperated with Samsung Electronics in the 14nm process previously, but we have decided to choose a different approach for the 7nm technology and, additionally, the IBM deal has significantly enhanced our resources and development capabilities allowing us to develop the 7nm process in-house,” he said.

GloFlo had decided to jump from 14nm to 7nm directly, while skipping the 10nm process because it believed that 10nm will help not much to improve power consumption and costs for clients.

“The 10nm node is more like a semi-generation process, similar to the previous the 20nm technology, which could not meet clients' requirements,”he said.

The foundry was getting comments from clients indicating that they need the 7nm products urgently so pouring technology resources into developing the 7nm process made more sense.

GloFo’s internal roadmap has the 7nm process is expected to enter volume production in the first half of 2018 with initial clients including IBM and AMD.

“The 7nm process has a number of advantages, including multi-core, high-speed I/O capabilities, reducing power consumption by 60 per cent, upgrading performance by 30 per cent , cutting costs by 30 per cent doubling the yield rate per wafer, while providing 2.5D/3D packaging services,” he said.

Last modified on 07 November 2016
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